More Burge torture settlements: $12.3 million

City's tab in cases linked to former police commander hits $85M

September 05, 2013|By Hal Dardick | Tribune reporter

Marvin Reeves, with Sonya Reeves, walks out of Cook County Jail in 2009, when he and former co-defendant Ronald Kitchen were released from custody. Reeves and Kitchen each spent more than two decades in prison for a 1988 quintuple homicide but were later granted certificates of innocence and alleged they were victims of police torture. (Abel Uribe, Chicago Tribune)

Marvin Reeves has struggled to escape the long shadow of notorious former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge since being released after 21 years in prison and being declared innocent in the homicides of two mothers and their three children.

Not even Thursday's announcement of $12.3 million in legal settlements — divided equally between him and onetime co-defendant Ronald Kitchen — will relieve all of the pain for Reeves, who is battling health problems and unemployed while living with his sister on the South Side four years after winning his freedom. The City Council Finance Committee is expected to approve the settlements Friday.

"So as far as the money, it's a small token ... because the trauma never goes away," Reeves, 55, said Thursday in a telephone interview. "It's a slow process, but we're making progress, and this is just one step. ... I hope dearly that Chicago and the United States as a collective whole understand no wrong deed goes unpunished and no right deed goes unnoticed."

Reeves praised Mayor Rahm Emanuel for striving to clear the backlog of lawsuits filed against the city, Burge and many of the detectives who worked under him. Emanuel has said he wants to put the scandal behind the city, and Corporation Counsel Stephen Patton, the city's top attorney, has said he's working to settle them to prevent even higher costs and in some cases because "it's the right thing to do."

But still it's costly. With the $12.3 million for Reeves and Kitchen, the city's cost from settlements and legal fees for the misconduct of Burge and his detectives will have soared to nearly $85 million.

That doesn't include Cook County, whose prosecutors oversaw the Burge cases. So far the county has paid out about $10.7 million in legal fees and settlements in Burge cases, according to public records. Unlike the city, though, the county is still fighting the accusations leveled by Kitchen and Reeves.

"When will it stop bleeding?" Ald. Carrie Austin, 34th, chairwoman of the council Budget Committee, asked Thursday of Burge's costs to the city. "I think the then-Police Department did the citizens of Chicago an injustice by allowing Cmdr. Burge to run rampant as he did and not hold him accountable for any of his convictions."

The hemorrhaging could go on for years. While only three more Burge-related lawsuits are pending against the city — 17 in all have been resolved — a state commission has found credible evidence that torture was used against men later imprisoned in more than a dozen other Burge-led cases.

Reeves and Kitchen each spent more than two decades in prison for the 1988 quintuple homicide, 13 of those years on death row for Kitchen. After their release in 2009, both were granted certificates of innocence, similar to pardons.

Burge has been accused of supervising a crew of detectives in the 1970s and 1980s who beat and tortured mostly African-American criminal suspects into falsely confessing to murders and other crimes. In some instances the abuse allegedly involved using plastic bags to nearly suffocate suspects and cattle prods applied to genitals.

Burge was convicted in federal court in 2010 of lying in a civil case about his knowledge of the torture and is serving a 41/2-year sentence in a prison in North Carolina.

Kitchen said he was beaten with a blackjack, a telephone and a telephone book before falsely confessing to the homicides and implicating Reeves, who also was allegedly beaten for hours but did not confess. Kitchen said he also was kicked and punched repeatedly for several hours and denied an attorney.

The two also accused prosecutors of concealing from a jury that a prison informant who was a key witness against them received no benefits in return for his testimony even though he was transferred from prison to a work-release program and his family was moved to a new apartment.

The informant "was looking to make a deal," Russell Ainsworth, Reeves' attorney, said Thursday. "The state's attorney's office and police officers took him and ran with it. He was giving them obvious lies. But they took it nonetheless and used it to convict two innocent men."

Kitchen's attorneys had sought to have former Mayor Richard Daley, who was the Cook County state's attorney at the time of the killings, to answer questions under oath as part of the lawsuit, but the settlement will end the need for that deposition.